NHS patients are missing out on specialist treatment because doctors are
overstretched, a leading British health expert has warned.

Prof Karol Sikora, dean of the University of Buckingham Medical School, gave the warning as American criticism of the NHS designed to destabilise Barack Obama’s plans for healthcare reform intensified.

Prof Sikora also claimed that NHS queues for scans and other tests “can emulate Heathrow on a bank holiday weekend”.

A number of public health experts have poured scorn on the claims about the standard of the British health system.

One senior Republican, Chuck Grassley, claimed that Ted Kennedy, the 77-year-old Democrat politician, would not have been treated for his brain tumour in Britain because of his age.

But Prof Sikora warned that British patients did trail their American counterparts in a number of areas.

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“Only seven per cent of eligible patients get precision guided radiotherapy even though we’ve got the equipment (just) not the time to use it,” he said.

“Nobody in the US wants to wait four hours to be seen in the emergency room or six months for a scan to sort out a torn ligament," he claimed.

“Over there, things are done instantly.

“As a young doctor working in San Francisco I couldn’t believe that when I had a patient who needed non-urgent surgery that I could actually speak to the consultant by ‘phone and offered surgery the next day."

He added: “We’ve speeded up the early phase of the cancer pathway but serial queuing for scans, biopsies and other tests can emulate Heathrow on a bank holiday weekend.”

British patients are given fewer expensive new cancer drugs than in France let alone America, he added.

“In cancer medicine we simply can’t offer the range of new drugs available to all in Boulogne far less New York."

Official figures show that Britain spends almost half as much on cancer drugs as some of its European counterparts, £76 per head in a year compared with £143 in Germany and £121 in France.

Prof Sikora also warned that a financial crisis was looming for the NHS, much like in pensions.

“Inevitably in a tax-based government run health service, the increasing costs will be borne by younger working population.

“At a time of rapid health inflation due to innovative technology, this is just unsustainable. The same tensions apply to defined benefit pensions for public sector workers. We are rapidly approaching the point at which the political fudging of pensions and health care will no longer be possible,” he warned.

Although he has appeared in American television adverts warning of the problems in the NHS, Prof Sikora said he did not think the health system on the other side of the Atlantic was perfect. “The current US health care system is a mess,” he said. “How can nearly 50 million people without adequate health insurance ever be justified?”

A spokesman for the Department of Health said: ""The NHS sees one million people every 36 hours and 93 per cent of patients rate their care as good or excellent.

"In recent years patients have benefited from record levels of investment and more lives have been saved through better prevention and treatment and waiting lists are at their lowest ever levels."